Freud vs. Jung Theories Essay

Some debate over who is right over Freud and Jung’s theories are questionable. Freud’s theory believed our consciousness is a thin slice of the total mind and describes it in an imagine of an iceberg. Believed that our unconscious mind holds all of our experiences, memories, and repressed materials. Our unconscious motives often competed with our conscious and create internal conflict which is in neurotic symptoms (anxiety and depression). Also Freud believed personality consisted of three systems: The Id, Ego, and Superego.

The Id contains a human’s basic, instinctual drives including bodily needs, wants, desires, and impulses, particularly our sexual and aggressive drives. The ego comprises the organized part of the personality structure that includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions. Lastly, the super-ego is the judicial branch of a persons personality and includes a person’s moral code, the main concern being whether an action is good or bad.

Sadly, these three aspects of personality also conflict resulting in neurotic behaviour. Carl Jung’s theory divides the psyche into three parts. The first is the ego, which he identifies with the conscious mind. Next is the personal unconscious, which includes anything which is not presently conscious, but could be. Lastly the personal unconscious is like most people’s understanding of the unconscious in that it includes both memories that are easily brought to mind and those that have been suppressed for any reason.

There are some experiences that show the effects of the collective unconscious more clearly than others. An example would be the near-death experience. They speak of leaving their bodies, seeing their bodies and the events surrounding them clearly, of being pulled through a long tunnel towards a bright light, of seeing old relatives or religious figures waiting for them, and disappointed having to leave this happy scene to return to their bodies and return to reality.

Some terms Jung created was Archetypes, which is naturally born instincts that we may have been presented by our long gone ancestors. Overall, Freud felt that sex was the single most important force that shaped and guided personality. Believed that your childhood greatly influenced your personality. Jung believed that both the future and the past are important in influencing one’s personality. I greatly agree with Jung because not just only a specific time period could change your personality, your whole time period of experiencing everything shapes yourself.

Jung argued that the unconscious could also be a source of creativity rather than Freud’s idea. Jung was onto something with his idea of a collective unconscious, while we cannot define, analyze or see it, there is some thread in the world that somehow connects us all. As people we all have similar feelings, regardless of your cultural upbringing or where in the world you live, there is a commonality among us, that Jung’s theory of unconscious can help explain.

According to my theory, the flow of knowledge into the collective unconscious stops at a person’s death. This addition is needed to balance the knowledge base of collective, otherwise if the flow of information did not stop at death, our collective unconscious would be able to answer some of our biggest questions such as “Is there an afterlife? ”. Jung’s diagram I agree with greatly, describing which goes where in my perspective. My thoughts are closely related to Jung’s rather than Freud’s theory.

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